The translation of conceptual metaphor in political news

Metaphorical expressions (MEs) are abundant in political text and their translation poses challenges particularly for retaining the implicit meaning. This research focuses on examining the use of conceptual metaphors (CMs) in Indonesian political news and their English translation. The objectives are to identify types and the source domain of CMs and to explain how the CMs are translated. Grounding on mixed-methods, the data were metaphorical expressions in the Indonesian and English versions of Tempo weekly magazines in April, May, and June in 2021. Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) was applied to determine the metaphoricity of metaphors in the STs and Indonesian dictionary (KBBI) was also employed to avoid intuition decision-making. The results indicate that CMs are commonly used in political news in order to popularize, concretize, and dramatize issues. Structural metaphors are found as the most dominant type and twenty source domains are found in the STs with war metaphor as the most significant domain. In terms of the translation, the study demonstrates that non metaphorical translation is the most frequently used technique to render metaphors into English TT. As a result, the translation reduces the metaphoric function of the original expressions.


INTRODUCTION
A metaphor is traditionally defined as figurative language used to create an aesthetic rhetorical effect in a text.As a figure of speech, metaphor is often seen as a figure of thought.Metaphor has been studied extensively in literary texts, such as novels, poems, lyric poetry, and prose over the years.Thus, most people perceive metaphor as merely an imaginative, poetic, and ornamental device used in literary texts.However, in current context, metaphor has been largely used in non-literary work such as media text and speeches (e.g.Lule, 2014;Chilton & Ilyin, 1993;Sadeq et al., 2022).
In news text, one particular journalistic device used is Conceptual Metaphor (CM) which serves to popularize, concretize, and dramatize issues (Hellsten, 2002).Studies have shown that CM not only reflects one's ideas or understanding but also clarifies one's conceptual system, which enables human beings to construct the world and conceptualize reality.In media text, metaphor has the power to highlight some aspects in the text while at the same time hiding other aspects (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980).Metaphor in news text is not merely a figure of speech to draw the context using other concepts but also to show a strategy in absorbing the audience's attention within the communication.Through this method, metaphor allows the audience to understand one's way of thinking.Metaphor can also convert human's activity into words which can ease understanding the context thoroughly.One particular media text that metaphor has been used extensively is political text, where in writers use the language feature to foreground or hide certain aspects of an issue.
Metaphor and political text or discourse are intertwined, as suggested by Thompson (1996, p.185) holding that "politics without metaphors is like a fish without water".Numerous studies have been conducted on CM in political discourse such as political speech (Sadeq et al., 2022) and political news (Arcimaviciene, 2010;Xu, 2015;Otieno et al., 2016;Lenard & Cosic, 2017).As Kövecses (1999) said, human beings always resort to metaphors to understand new things.It is common that political activities are complicated and contain abstract notions that are difficult for most people to understand.Since, a society that lacks a background in political knowledge cannot comprehend the essence of the discourse.With the aid of metaphors, abstract notions are more easily expressed to achieve the intended effect in political news.Politics is often perceived as a serious, strict activity; however, metaphors can serve various purposes that give better results.
Researches have concentrated on the translation of metaphors in literal texts, which cannot be applied to the translation of metaphors in political discourse directly due to its particular features.Given the complexity and particularity of political discourses, a socio-cultural grounded analysis on the use of metaphor should be paid attention.Recently, merging translation studies and Cognitive Linguistics contributes to scrutinizing the cognitive process of translation and offering a theoretical framework for resolving translation difficulties, providing insights to the translation of conceptual metaphors (Wen, 2018;Wu & Yang, 2020;Wang & Chen, 2022).
This study views that political text media can be complex as it may contain implied meaning and ideologies.Thus, the metaphor used in the text cannot be understood and translated by looking the linguistic aspect only.The text should be seen as discourse within its relevant socio-cultural context.Within this context, the purpose of this study is to identify CMs in Indonesian political news texts and their translation into English.It particularly investigates how Indonesians conceptualize and interpret politics in their metaphorical language; and how these metaphors are translated into English.

Conceptual Metaphor
The word metaphor comes from Greek: Meta (over) and pherein (to carry).Metaphors are considered to be the transmission of meaning from the object to the listener.Metaphor, according to Abrams (1999:97), is the use of words or expressions to describe something different without any clear comparison.It is difficult to interpret metaphors literally, for instance The sun is a creature of habit.Metaphor can merely be literal descriptions.The sun, of course, is not a creature.Nonetheless, this metaphor describes the pattern and the repetition of sunrises and sunsets.Metaphor is commonly used as a figurative language that dresses the language of literature such as poems and novels.Figurative language is the language use of the standard meaning or standard order of words to achieve poetic language function (Abrams, 1999:96).For instance, She is feeling blue.The common meaning of 'blue' could be the color of the sky on a clear, bright day, but describing feeling as blue means that a particular girl is feeling sad.Traditionally, figurative language is divided into several types, such as similes, hyperboles, metaphors, idioms, personification.
According to cognitive linguistics, a metaphor is understood as a combination of one conceptual domain with a different conceptual domain (Kovecses, 2010).Kövecses defines metaphor as the way one conceptual domain can be understood in terms of another conceptual domain, "when people talk and think about love/life in terms of journeys, about arguments in terms of war, about theories in terms of buildings, about ideas in terms of food, and about social organizations in terms of plants, this is what is known by a conceptual metaphor" (2010:2).CM involves two domains; one is better understood than the other to convey a concept; they are the source domain or the more concrete domain, and the target domain or the abstract subject (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980;Kövecses, 2010).A contemporary approach was proposed by Lakoff & Johnson (1992) who view metaphor from a cognitive perspective.In their book Metaphor We Live By, published in 1980, they discuss the cognitive perspective of metaphor.The theory is well known as Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT).The authors reject the notion that metaphors are limited to literary texts, rather they believe that metaphors are integrated into human thought and action, not only in language.Lakoff (1992:203) asserts five traditional false assumptions rejected by CMT: 1) everyday language is literal, none is metaphorical; 2) all subject matters can be comprehended literally without metaphor; 3) only literal language can be contingently true or false, 4) all definitions given in the lexicon of a language are literal, not metaphorical, and 5) the concepts used in the grammar of a language are all literal, none is metaphorical.Lakoff & Johnson (1980) state that life consists of many abstract things that are not understandable by all people.As a result, they held that metaphor is understood and experienced through another concept that is more concrete and familiar to people.According to CMT, metaphor is more than just a stylistic feature of language, it is a fundamental aspect of thought.
"War" is one of the most common conceptual metaphors (CMs) in human cognition.War metaphor is used in various patterns of discourse, such as politics, business, sport, disease, and love (Ling, 2010).Lakoff & Johnson (1980:124) exemplify war metaphor in "I've never won an argument with him", "He shot down all of my arguments", "He attacked every weak point in my argument" are three sentences which reflect the CM of ARGUMENT IS WAR.A number of vocabulary are used in the argument to indicate the concept of war, including indefensible, attack, target, weapon, win, lose, and strategy (see also Lule, 2004).Furthermore, vocabularies also reflect how people think and behave in an argument.In a war, soldiers struggle to defend their positions and try to attack the enemy.People also defend their opinions in arguments while critiquing the opinions of their opponents.In this sense, argument is as a physical fight as in warfare.
A group of researchers (Pragglejaz Group, 2007) offer a procedure namely Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) to determine metaphor in a text.They analyze the lexical unit by establishing its meaning in context, and determining whether it has more basic contemporary meanings in another context than the one in the given context.Basic meanings tend to be more concrete (what they evoke is easier to imagine, see, hear, feel, smell, and taste), related to bodily action, more precise (as opposed vague), and historically order.Those steps help researchers to determine whether the text is metaphoric or not, even though it cannot be applied to all metaphor types because conceptual metaphor is related to concepts that can vary within the individual.
Three types of CM suggested by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) are orientational, ontological, and structural metaphor.Orientational metaphor is not related to one concept in terms of another but organizes the whole system concept in terms of another (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980:14).Orientation metaphor refers to ways of thinking (up-down, in-out, front-back, etc.) that are common to people.For instance, HAPPY IS UP, SAD IS DOWN as suggested by Lakoff & Johnson (1980:14).Culture matters when it comes to orientational metaphors; some cultures might not consider words that indicate "up" to represent a happy feeling.For example, "I'm feeling up" means "I'm feeling good" while "my spirits rose" means "I became sadder" on other occasions.It is possible that metaphorical concepts in orientational metaphors originated from physical and cultural experiences.Dropping postures, for example, denote sadness while upright postures indicate a positive feeling; this is the basis of the metaphor HAPPY IS UP and SAD IS DOWN.
Ontological metaphor is a conceptual mapping from an abstract non-physical entity to a more concrete and material origin, e.g.THE MIND IS A BRITTLE OBJECT and THE MIND IS A MACHINE metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980:27-28).Ontological metaphor is much less cognitively structuring than structural metaphor.It simply enables general categories of abstract target concepts to take on new ontological status and to become abstract entities (Kövecses, 2010:92).As an example, My mind is not operating today; referring to the fact that an abstract thing (mind) has a physical property (operate) of doing something.Moreover, a speaker can use ontological metaphors for a number of specific purposes, such as discussing, quantifying, or identifying aspects of the experience that are more clearly defined.
The most obvious ontological metaphor is personification.A distinction between an ontological metaphor and personification would be that an ontological metaphor relates an abstract concept (human and non-human) to an abstract concept (non-human), whereas personification relates an abstract concept (non-human) to an abstract concept (human).This metaphor can be illustrated with the following examples: (1) My mind doesn't work today, and (2) Inflation eats away at our property.Example 1 shows that the mind is operating, while operating is not a human activity; it is what machines do.From this perspective, the concept is known as THE MIND IS A MACHINE metaphor.The inflation in example 2 is an abstract concept, and eating up is what humans do.Therefore, example 1 is an ontological metaphor, while example 2 is a personification.Lakoff & Johnson provide a deeper example such as "inflation is destroying the foundation of our economy" or "our greatest enemy at the moment is inflation".Although inflation is personified, the metaphor is not merely "inflation as person" but a more specific "inflation as adversary" (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003:35).
Structural metaphor refers to conceptual mappings which are very structured and parallel between the source domain and the target domain, e.g.TIME IS MONEY metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980:7-9).Lakoff & Johnson provide examples, such as "I don't have the time to give you" and "How do you spend your time these days?" (1980:8).Both of the metaphors indicate time as money to be spent.Structural metaphor entails systematic correlation within human experience.By using this metaphor, the speaker understands a term in a more understandable way.Each domain has a conceptual structure that is similar yet dissimilar.A relatively rich knowledge structure from the source domain provides a valuable understanding of the target domain concept, as a result of conceptual mappings between A and B (Kövecses, 2010:37).

The Translation of Metaphor
In order to reach a wider audience, news text is often translated into other languages.The translator plays a crucial role in rendering the messages, yet they often encounter problems in translating metaphorical expressions (MEs) due to linguistic and cultural differences between the source language (SL) and the target language (TL) (Newmark, 1988;Schäffner, 2004).The process of translation involves at least two languages by processing the SL and producing the TL (Alves & Albir, 2010).It is possible that the TL utterances are similar in form or meaning to the SL utterances.Translation products (TT) as the outcome of a complex process are compared with the starting point (ST) and theories based in part on dissimilarities (shifts of expression, Popovic, 1970) between the TT and the ST are proposed.When formulating the hypothesis, the translator must keep in mind that much of the translation process takes place automatically and subconsciously (Alves & Albir, 2010:29).Metaphors are translated using psycholinguistic tests.The focus will be on how linguistic and cultural differences affect translation, including how they are handled and how they constrain translation.A practical application to analyze existing translations and discover which MEs are translated can be used with MIP.
Crerar-Bromelow ( 2008) suggests that the universality of metaphor as a thought process can help us pass over interlingual barriers.Moreover, she argues that an awareness of CM also enables us to investigate terminology since conventionally arguable terms that define a category of meaning (Saussure) are often essentially metaphorical in nature.As a way of minimizing translation errors, Crerar-Bromelow suggest that one may be able to employ CM analysis.Research on metaphor has been interested in the linguistic, conceptual, and communicative dimensions of metaphor.The linguistic dimension elaborates how the metaphor is used in different languages through the grammatical system, etc.The conceptual dimension examines the process of metaphor in thought, how it is processed and produced into metaphor.The communicative dimension investigates how metaphor is used in real discourse; how it affects the reader, what are the intentions behind using metaphor, etc.
The translation of metaphor requires a comparison and contrast of metaphors both literally and contextually in order to gain a full understanding.Some strategies of translating metaphor have been proposed by some scholars (Alshunnag, 2016;Schӓffner, 2004;Nader, 2013 andFernandez, 2013).Those techniques are as follows.1. Parallel TT Metaphor: the TT metaphor corresponds to ST metaphor linguistically and conceptually.
This involves the following cases: a) Literal: the ST metaphorical expression is rendered literally.b) Explication: the ST metaphorical expression is explicated in the TT.c) Elaboration: the ST metaphorical expression is further elaborated in the TT.d) Different TT metaphor but related: the ST metaphorical expression is translated with a different TT metaphorical expression, but it still relates conceptually to the ST metaphor.2. Different TT metaphorical expression: the ST conceptual metaphor is rendered differently in the TT, with a different conceptual and metaphorical expression.3. Non-metaphorical: The ST metaphorical expression is rendered into a non metaphorical expression in TT, without any metaphorical image.4. Deletion: The ST metaphorical expression is not rendered at all in the TT, and thus the conceptual metaphor is deleted.

METHOD
This research adopts the principles of mixed-methods approach in language analysis.The data were metaphorical expressions in Tempo weekly magazines in Indonesian and English versions.A total of seventeen news articles in the weekly magazines published in April, May, and June in 2021 were used as the main source of data.The STs were collected based on the published date to ease the comparison of the translated texts.In order to identify the ME in the STs, the corpus was taken into account based on the lexical unit using MIP.It was done with the inclusion of Indonesian dictionary or Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI) and Merriam Webster Dictionary (MWD) in order to compare both languages' metaphors.The corpus is then classified to identify the source domain of the metaphor using cognitive theory, followed by the identification of CM types; orientational metaphor, ontological metaphor, and structural metaphor.

Types of Conceptual Metaphor
Based on the MIP method, the analysis reveals that metaphors are commonly used in political news in Tempo.A total of 681 metaphorical expressions are found in the ST.As compared to the SL's metaphors, the translated metaphors are largely identified as nonmetaphorical.These results demonstrate that a metaphor in the SL is not necessarily a metaphor in the TT and most of them become non-metaphoric when translated into English.
The findings show a huge gap between the number of metaphors in the STs (681) and the TT (95).This huge number of metaphorical expressions (MEs) (681) covers repetitive expressions, but when they are categorized into CMs, the number becomes 371.This number of MEs is included in the analysis because the same expression sometimes mean differently and signifies different Source Domain and Target Domain.These CMs are divided into several domains in order to discover what types of CMs are used.The source domain of metaphors are found to be diverse in the STs.There are over sixty source domains in the seventeen political news articles.To narrow down the research landscape, the data uses 'other metaphors' to gather the minority of the source domains.Therefore, the analysis displays twenty source domains which are frequently accounted for in the source data.The frequencies of identified source domains are shown in Table 1.The CMs are categorized into three categories: orientational, ontological, and structural metaphors.The CM types are identified based on the theory of Lakoff & Johnson's 'Metaphors We Live By' (1980) added with Kövecses' 'Metaphor' (2010).Among 681 MEs, 363 are identified as structural metaphors, followed by ontological metaphor (296) and orientational metaphor (22) as shown in Table 2.The war metaphors are found to dominate the other types of source domains which are identified as a structural metaphor.Table 1 shows that "war" has become the most dominant Source Domain in the Indonesian politics in the media and it plays a significant role in simplifying abstract conflicts within politics.In line with Lule (2004), in the context of media coverage of war in Iraq, the role of metaphor and news language is significant in the conception and construction of war.The war metaphor which is categorized as structural metaphor is able to organize and structure the content into the familiar structure.This also works with a politics-journey metaphor which displays the politician's role in surviving to overcome the intensity within the country.By using journey metaphor, the writers take the readers to the familiar structure of travelers thriving towards a particular goal.This is also applicable for the rest of source domains which gain the interest and comprehensible understanding.
Ontological metaphors and orientational metaphors are also found in the data.These metaphors also serve common source domains to ease the reader to understand the abstract concept.For instance, object metaphor, which is the second most identified source domain in the ST.The object metaphor, in political context, mostly considers human-being, organization, event, and policy as an object.Moreover, the results reveal the tendency in using humanization in describing political activities as the human conceptual source domain, such as: war, journey, person, music, heat, animal, business, food, size, cause, sport, and others.The same works for object, motion, container, movement, path, and distance ontological metaphors which simplify the understanding of many political abstract circumstances in the study.Orientational metaphors in the ST, up and down domains, are observed to provide spatial orientations, which basically rely on physical and cultural experience within the source language; additionally, general to the reader.

Translation Techniques
The use of various techniques for translating different types of metaphor is in line with Sadeq et al. (2022).However, it is interesting to find that there is a huge gap in the number of CM in the ST and TT, implying that most of them (80.03%) have become non-metaphoricin the TL (Table 3).Thus, the application of this technique results in toning down the STs metaphor in the TTs.The comparison of those differences is represented by the fact that Indonesian political texts tend to apply metaphors in describing the context more than the English text.The ST texts insert a series of familiarizing and simplifying techniques that aim to add a dramatic image in the SL.The dominant use of metaphor in the Indonesian media also serves to popularize, concretize, and dramatize issues, which is in line with a study by Hellsten (2002).This also demonstrates a notable tendency to simplify and normalize the content to the English readers.The preservation of ST metaphorical expressions ranked second, with 11.60% of the total metaphors.This number includes seventy-one cases of literation technique, one case of explication, followed by four cases of elaboration and three cases of rendering to conceptually different TT metaphors.The translation of deleting technique comes third with a percentage of 5.58%, including thirty-eight MEs in the ST.By contrast, the least identified technique is a different TT metaphorical expression technique.This technique involves 19 MEs which are rendered in the TT.Table 4 provides more detailed elaboration of the use of the translation techniques.

Parallel TT Metaphor Technique
This translation technique involves the equivalence of MEs transferred from the ST to the TT.The similarities can be in the form of rendering the MEs in the ST literally, the explication and elaboration techniques of MEs in the ST, and the rendering of MEs with a different sense of the TT metaphor yet relates conceptually to the ST metaphor.This is important to keep in mind that explication and elaboration techniques are categorized as parallel TT metaphors since the MEs in the STs remain with additional information given by the translator.This category also includes the different renderings of MEs in the TT yet still relate conceptually to the ST metaphors' semantic domain.
TT: Later on, the PKB supported Ahmad as a candidate for regent, but he lost the election.The expression of melawan (Extract (1)) is used in the ST to conceptualize the process of argumentation in the form of fight.Since melawan is literally meant by against or fight, it includes in the category of parallel TT metaphor, besides, fought back against is used by the translator in the TT.This reveals the additional words in the TTs which illustrate the concept of elaborating in the translation process.In Extract (2), the ME used in the ST is kalah which translates as lost (literally: lost).Losing or winning an election is often known as a process of competing in a war.The expression of bolak-balik masuk (literal meaning: back and forth) (Extract (3)) refers to the undeveloped rules draft which is repeatedly submitted to the National Legislation Program.The translator used in and out instead of back and forth to illustrate the difference in the cultural conceptualization in dealing with the motion of process.In Extract (4), the expression of bawah is used in the ST in order to conceptualize the request of people who were commoners.Since bawah is literally meant by lower, it identifies as the category of parallel TT metaphor; as the TT used below by the translator.Despite the difference of the literal meaning, the context is still related to the ground level of the reference which expresses the different TT metaphor but related technique.

Different TT Metaphorical Expression Technique
This technique requires a shift of the ST metaphor to differentiate the metaphor of the TTs.It involves the understanding of the cultural differences manifested between the SL and the TL, which caused the metaphor in the ST to be replaced with different expressions in the TT.The following section provides details of MEs in the STs that are translated to DME techniques.Consider the following example to discover the identification by the conceptual mapping of A CARRIER IS A JOURNEY metaphor.
As shown in Extract (5), the metaphor used in the ST is maju (literally: go forward or go ahead) which translates as to run.The expression of maju is often used in the SL, since it enables the reader to understand the concept of one's journey in achieving a career.This CM is an evidence of the difference of metaphor in the STs and the TTs.The TL tends to elaborate one's journey with a certain amount of energy.

Non-Metaphorical Technique
This most dominant technique suggest the translation into non-metaphorical expressions.This strategy involves the investigation of cultural understandings between the SL and the TL.Moreover, the ST metaphor focuses on the communication sense, so the ME in the TT is easily comprehended by readers.
An example of this metaphor is diangkat.Despite its literal meaning 'be appointed', it is not identified as a metaphor in the TL.However, this expression refers to an organization determined to a higher position.This expression is also often used in terms of lifting an object in the SL.

Deletion Technique
This technique completely deals with the omission of the MEs in the TT.Additionally, the MEs provided in the STs do not translate in the TT.
(8) ST: Pejabat di bawah mencontoh atasannya.TT: (not translated) The first expression of meneken (literally: sign) is not transferred to the TT; while di bawah (literally: under) is totally omitted in the sentence.Meneken refers to Firli who has been controlled by a number of employees.In addition to di bawah, it refers to an official who was contolled by their boss.
This study has yielded rich results in relation to the use of figurative language to describe political issues, which for some people difficult to understand.The concepts are sometimes complicated and contain abstract notions, on the other hand people lack a background in political knowledge cannot comprehend the essence of the discourse.It then can be understood that in the ST language, metaphor is abundantly used to collapse complex matters into more simplified packets of information that can be easily understood by the public.Media and Politicians use conceptual metaphors in their discourse to enable them to make a better communication with the target audience in delivering their massage and their views about certain topics (Sadeq et al., 2022).This is confirmed by Mio (1997) who highlights that metaphor has helped politicians in communicating more effectively by addressing latent symbolic themes residing in segments of the public consciousness.When talking about symbols, metaphoric expressions may also contain hidden agenda that is too vulgar when expressed in literal language.However, it has been generally accepted that metaphor has been used to obscure socially unacceptable and empirically unsupportable arguments (Falk, 2013).For further investigation involving the use of metaphor in political discourse, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) would provide rich methodological and theoretical framework for analysis, where in ideology and power are pivotal to be considered in the analysis.
Another issue highlighted in the results is the difficulties in tranferring conceptual metaphor.Massey & Ehrensberger-Dow (2017) and Panahbar et al. (2016) suggest that complex metaphor might indeed be cultures pecific and there is a need to re-map to a source-language target domain.Further, the translation process requires source-text comprehension, problem awareness, problem identification and the formulation of target-text concepts functionally analogous to those of the source text.When it comes to political text, translation needs to be devoted to more than surface manifestations of metaphorical expressions and cannot just view metaphor as an esthetic manifestation (see Panahbar et al., 2016)

CONCLUSION
The results show that structural metaphors are the most frequently used in the source text.Each type of conceptual metaphor draws on a variety of source domains: structural metaphors, ontological metaphors, and orientational metaphors.Tempo's Indonesian political news largely use human conceptualization in articulating abstract context as a physical entity as suggested by Kövecses (2010).In terms of the translation techniques, the high use of non-metaphorical technique suggests the toning down of the MEs and a notable tendency to simplify and normalize the content to the TT's readers.Yet, a critical analysis of the use of non-metaphorical technique should be carried out to further investigate the underlying purpose as well as the consequences.
This research has also invited further investigation regarding the high use of non-metaphorical translation, whether this is the issue of translator's competence or language equivalence.Regardless the main issue, media text is intended to help readers understand social or political realities without significant difficulties.Translators have choices, whether to use figurative or non figuative language, to fit their targeted readers, of the Indonesian and English versions, which have different socio-cultural background.This has answered the ongoing issue of figurative language translation, that is naturalness, which has always become a challenge for translators.